From traditional to IT mediated interorganizational relationships: sensemaking of the internet

“We provide a solution that allows saving 15 to 20 euros per invoice.It is very important in a strategy of service and cost reductions for our customers and for us.” “For us, it is very important as we generally reduce our inventories by 30%, thus we recover cash flow. It is not negligible.” These quotes out of my case studies show that the primary goal of the implementation of Web-based applications is the achievement of transaction cost efficiencies: cost cutting, time saving, and information integration. But do they achieve such results? Sometimes they do sometime they don’t. In order to understand why, I consider it is necessary to take a different perspective from the one taken until now. Indeed, existing studies on interorganizational information systems focus on economical and strategic issues and consider organizations as opaque entities. First, issues at hand may not be economic or strategic but social or legal. Next, they neglect that inter-organizational relationships imply a number of long-standing social interactions between individuals of each organization. Moreover, these individuals interpret the mediation project and act taking decision, implementing, or using the mediating technology – that these individuals make sense of the IT mediation project. In the present research, I propose to open the black box of organizations and explore how people sensemaking conditions the achievement of transaction cost benefits and is conditioned by the interorganizational context. My overarching research question is: How do people make sense of the Internet mediation of long-standing interorganizational relationships?